Emergence (33 page)

No more were coming, the thresh realised.

Not a one of them.

Turning its back on the Above, the thresh began the journey back to Her Majesty to tell of the Dave, of his inexplicable familiarity with the lore of the Horde and his betrayal of that lore.

There could be only one answer to this, the thresh knew.

War.

Epilogue

S
he emerged through the mud and silt, past the breach in the barrier holding the UnderRealms apart from the Above. With powerful strokes she pushed and shoved and wriggled through rock and stone, holding her breath until she punched through into water. With emerald eyes open she saw the faintest hint of starlight above, filling her with a fervent hope that after ages of privation, she might have found her way back.

With the same powerful strokes she beat the water into a flurry, swimming up to the surface past startled fish and other creatures too small to feed on. She emerged in the steady current of a river and took a deep breath. Scents both wondrous and sublime tickled her memories of when she and her kind had soared above the mountains, above plains and forests. Memories of creatures from this realm came to her. The calflings and their feedstock.

From time to time in the past, they had been scarce and she had known hunger. Yet now her nostrils flared. It was as though they smelled the whole world. The air itself was a banquet of possibilities. She hammered at water and air, expanding her gas bladders, clawing her way up with puffs and snorts of fire jetting from her snout.

She broke the surface. Catching a thermal, the ancient Drakon lifted herself into the sky, giddy with the thrill of flight after so long in slumber beneath the crushing rock and the unmovable capstone. She climbed higher and higher, revelling in the freedom of unrestrained flight for the first time in unknowable ages. A few powerful beats of her stiff, aching wings and she was powering through the clouds, swooping and twirling, basking in the remembered joy of her hatchling time, when she had first learned to fly. Clouds and stars above rolled with her in a tumbling twirl.

She paused in her reveries.

Something was wrong.

Very wrong.

For night-time it was far too bright, she realised. Where was the heavy cloak of darkness that covered her approach to the fields and tiny homesteads of the prey?

There were strange sounds in the air. The growling of metal on metal and the mating call of untold numbers of creatures rang in her ears. An oily, nasty odour overlaid the sweet delicate scent of what lay beneath her wings.

Gliding in the direction of the coast,
dar Drakon
saw that the land beneath her was awash in light far more powerful than mere candles and burning torches. It was as though the land itself were burning. What wizardry was this?

Surveying the land below her with sharp emerald eyes, the dragon saw a brightly lit clearing of stonework.

Strange, but perhaps there would be answers, she decided.

She spied a creature she had never seen before. Some winged beast of magnificent ivory, silver, and blue glided across the masonry work, attended to by smaller grey hatchlings.

Their wings did not flap. They did not seem to exert themselves in the slightest as they glided along.

A roar of unearthly power reached her ears.

A challenge! This strange Drakon must be the dominant of this region.

She had never abjured a challenge, not across the eons, and what tales would be told if she could best the new, strange creature.

She slipped into a power dive and launched herself at the creature’s nest from out of the clouds, narrowing her wings and letting out as much of her gas as she dared. Soaring over treetops and fields, she could feel her speed increasing as the great white creature howled and began to climb into the air, attended by her hatchlings.

Stupid,
dar Drakon
thought, waiting for the blue-headed thing to turn its gaze toward the challenger. Such contempt and surety was unknown among even the most hardened of her kind. She would teach this creature a hard lesson about impudence.

Shiggurath Ur Drakon clicked her jaws together twice to ignite her remaining gas reserves and let the creature feel the heat of her challenge. Squirting a tight stream of fire through the night, she caught one of the hatchlings. The tiny thing’s gas bladders exploded, singeing her scaly hide so badly that it alarmed her. Bits of bone pierced her wings, but she kept on until she caught the larger creature’s head in her claws. She had timed her attack perfectly and sat astride the creature, as Gulyok Ur Drakon had mounted her to plant his seed in her belly so long ago.

The triumph was marred by Shiggurath’s complete incomprehension about what to do next, however. Her claws dug into and punctured the skin of this beast, but it did not yield as flesh might. She raked at the exposed neck, just behind the animal’s bulbous head. But the head never moved, and she gained no purchase on the vulnerable meat. It was passing strange. Indeed, the only thing to which she might compare the experience was a vague recollection of biting down on an armoured calfling in the far distant past.

The creature’s attendant nestlings, unsurprisingly, were deeply disturbed by the attack and swooped around her, coming so close that the roar of their gas bladders all but deafened Shiggurath. They did not mount her as she mounted their mother, however, and tiring of trying to unravel the mystery, she opened her jaws wide and bit through the armoured hide of this odd, stiff Drakon.

Wind erupted from within the beast, carrying with it the dimly remembered scent of calfling meat. Cooking calfling meat.

Flames licked the wings of the Drakon foe and ran down its spine.

Shiggurath tore free a large strip of the creature’s hide and tossed it back at one of the hatchlings that was flying behind her, possibly hoping to creep up and mount the old, wily Drakon when she was not paying it due heed.

But Shiggurath did not get to be an old and wily Drakon by falling for that sort of Fangr guano. The massive chunk of stiffened hide slammed into the pursuing nestling. To her surprise it exploded, as though all of its bladders had ruptured at once.

Decapitated and burning, the mother’s death scream was short-lived as it plummeted back into the masonry work.

Shiggurath flipped in midair, landing on the masonry work with a cracking thud.

At the last possible instant before impact she had seen something.

A man. She was sure.

Inside the belly of this beast. It made no sense to her at all.

She rolled back onto her hind claws and examined herself. All around, the air was filled with strange howls and screams. Chariots rushed out in livery of yellow and red toward the slain creature, torchlights blinking and flickering in their mad dash across the stonework field. Shiggurath searched for a shank of meat or perhaps a wing that might have come from the collision, sniffed for the scent of rich blood.

The hide she found, jagged and sharp, was charred with flame. She picked it up, examined it, and tossed it aside.

Just armour. No meat at all, at least nothing worthy of the name.

High overhead the creature’s remaining hatchlings screamed. She could see them fleeing through the clouds, off into the stars. Maybe they would go find her a worthy foe with some meat to its bones instead of the thin, curved armour shell that now lay burning in the wreckage. Confused and not a little frustrated,
dar Drakon
returned to tending her wounds, plucking bits of metal armour from her hide, gently playing the sting of her own fire to cauterise flesh and stop the bleeding.

Across the field, a line of chariots charged toward her.

The Hunn can’t be here,
she thought. Nor the Djinn or Morphum. She had surely found the break in the capstone first.

The chariots came on nonetheless, bouncing over grass and mud, gaining purchase on the stonework before plunging into the grass again. And then another shock. Men drove these beastless chariots, she saw now. Her stomach growled.

Dar Drakon
leaped back into the air, mindless of her wounds and hurts. She was not afeared of the little men, of course, but she preferred to come at them from above with fire. Climbing through the billowing smoke of her slain foe, she thrust her wings up and down again and again, building power, clawing up into the clouds, away from the lights of the strange stone field. Strange thoughts piled up in her mind, demanding her attention. Each memory was a gem, and a fastidious Drakon would sort them all into neat, orderly little piles, with the emeralds in one place, rubies in the next, silver ingots on the third level of the lair, while the gold, the sweet, soft, luxurious gold, always went to the bottom of the trove.

The creature she had slain was no animal of flesh and blood as she knew it. It seemed entirely crafted from metal and fabric and powered by magicks. She turned in mid-flight to find the two surviving hatchlings roaring up from behind, spitting fire at her. Her surprised offence soon turned to shock and even fear as a thousand burning stones tore through her wings, prompting her to loose her own fire too soon in a roar of pain. Balling up to evade the hatchlings, she dived through the clouds, looking to gain an advantage. An old master at the game of cloud cover, she was confident that the young hatchlings would grow bored and give up.

Such thoughts were proved for a falsehood when a large iron spike flared through the clouds. Her temper in check, she took a deep breath and blew her own fury back at the spike.

That should
. . .

*

Dar Drakon
fell through the night sky.

She fell down through the clouds, chased by a glowing hail of red-orange lightning.

She felt the cool air slip over her grievously wounded body, the cauldron within extinguished. Idly, without feeling as though it had anything to do with her, Shiggurath watched her own severed wing falling alongside her. Her belly ripped asunder, she could feel the black bile of her insides running out.

She was numb from snout to tail spikes. It was as though the hot rocks the nestlings had spat at her had severed her from all her feelings. Or maybe she was just stunned by the blow of the flying iron spike.

It had exploded right next to her.

Shiggurath had not expected that at all.

She felt lightheaded and, when she thought about it as she fell, a little melancholy. Songs would be sung of this day when
dar Drakonen
returned to the Above. Her name should be in those songs, but as she fell, such hopes dwindled with her slowing heartsbeat.

The hatchlings were near her now, circling in her death spiral. She caught sight of one of them.

Such power for creatures so small.

She chuckled darkly as the river below raced up to meet her.

Slain by such a tiny thing, she thought. Who would have thought it possible?

Acknowledgements

Who to thank first?
Dr Who
, I think. It drove me nuts as a kid that guns seemed to have no effect at all on monsters. Like, why did Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT even bother? The Dave
Hooper series is an attempt, in part, to rectify that.

I’d also like to thank the producers of
Reign of Fire
, who annoyed me greatly with movie posters promising all sorts of dragon vs helicopter gunship awesomeness. And failed to deliver.

Less flippantly I have to thank my ur Champion publishers Cate Paterson, Tricia Narwani, Haylee Nash and the incomparable Alex Lloyd who all took up sword and shield with me on this long, strange quest.

To my wizardly agent, Russ ur Galen dar SGG, I offer tribute from the highest blood pot.

And for my armsman, SF Murphy, acknowledgement of his skill with blades and fire staff. His gurikh is second to none.

Finally, for my nestlings, Jane, Anna and Thomas . . . You are my Realm.

About John Birmingham

John Birmingham is the author of the cult classic
He Died With a Falafel in His Hand
; the award-winning history
Leviathan
; the Axis of Time
series:
Weapons of Choice
,
Designated Targets
and
Final Impact
, and the
Stalin’s Hammer: Rome
ebook; and the Disappearance trilogy:
Without Warning
,
After America
and
Angels of Vengeance
.

Between writing books he contributes to a wide range of newspapers and magazines on topics as diverse as the future of media and national security. Before becoming a writer he began his working life as a research officer with the Defence Department’s Office of Special Clearances and Records.

You can find John at his blog,
http://cheeseburgergothic.com
and on Twitter
@johnbirmingham
. You can also buy his books at
johnbirmingham.net
.

Want to save the world? Join the conversation on Twitter at #TheDave.

Also by John Birmingham

The Axis of Time series

Weapons of Choice: World War 2.1

Designated Targets: World War 2.2

Final Impact: World War 2.3

Stalin’s Hammer: Rome
(ebook)

The Disappearance trilogy

Without Warning

After America

Angels of Vengeance

Next in the DAVE HOOPER series from bestselling author John Birmingham

RESISTANCE

Available March 2015

Two bright geometric shapes, metallic flashes picked out in the morning sun, moving impossibly fast and straight amidst the visual clutter and chaos of forest and rock . . .

‘Is it dragons, Dave, is that what it is? Because I’m not ready for dragons . . .’

A dragon brings down the Vice President’s plane, a monster army is camped outside Omaha, and an empath demon springs an undercover operation in New York.

New Orleans was just the beginning. More and different demons are breaking through all over America, and Dave Hooper has a new enemy with more guile and guts than the celebrity superhero, who is still stumbling into his role as Champion. While his agent fields offers for movies and merchandise, Dave is tasked with ending a siege in Omaha, saving his friends and deciphering the UnderRealms’ plan to take over the earth.

As an ancient and legion evil threatens to destroy mankind, Dave has to decide what kind of man he wants to be and the nature of his role in this new world. He may not be the hero humanity deserves, but he’s the only one we’ve got.